Ian McEwan’s novels are full of elegant insights. But does his latest
take aim at too easy a target?

Ian McEwan’s new novel, you mightn’t be surprised to hear, features a deeply cultured and rational main character, with an important job and an almost achingly civilised north London domestic life. Interviewed by Zadie Smith in 2005, McEwan explained how much, as a young writer, he’d disliked the archetypal north London fiction of the time with its painstaking descriptions of furniture and blithe assumption of “a class bond… between writer and reader”. As an older one, he’s clearly got over both objections.

Saturday, for example, didn’t miss many chances to remind us of the loveliness of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne’s home: on waking, Mrs P opens her “vast built-in wardrobe, one of a pair, with automatic lights and intricate interior of lacquered veneer”; Henry himself can’t so much as fetch his wallet without McEwan telling us it was “in a room behind the kitchen, outside the wine vaults”. Now The Children Act opens with High Court judge Fiona Maye on her chaise longue, surrounded by “recessed bookshelves”, “walnut table” and “baby grand piano bearing silver-framed family photos on its deep black shine”. Later we learn that she and husband Jack like their morning coffee “strong, in tall white thin-lipped cups, filtered from high-grade Colombian beans, with warmed, not hot milk” – and on Saturdays accompanied by “warmed pains aux raisins from Lamb’s Conduit Street”.

But by then Fiona’s agreeable domestic life is facing a crisis that might have a lesser woman reaching for the Nescafé. In the first chapter, Jack informs her that he’s met a young woman with whom he'd like to have an affair. After all, he and Fiona haven’t made love for seven weeks and, at 60, he wants one last shot at sexual ecstasy. In fact, the temporary marriage breakdown and awkward renegotiations that follow are two of the best things in the book, done with all of McEwan’s elegant psychological sharpness. They might also be a riposte to a previous generation of writers, led by Philip Roth and John Updike (two of McEwan’s early heroes), who generally held that a man should follow his penis wherever it led and whatever damage it caused. Here, Jack soon realises that “he was a fool to be driven by sexual need”– while Fiona’s job in the Family Division allows for a surprisingly heartfelt denunciation of the same folly more widely.

But another surprise is how peripheral the story of her marriage turns out to be. “In all McEwan’s midlife work,” Hermione Lee wrote a few years ago, “a private drama of loss of innocence or betrayal is played out against a larger history of bad faith”. This time, though, it’s the other way around. As Jack’s betrayal hums in the background, McEwan concentrates instead on Fiona’s cases, where bad faith – in its most literal sense – takes centre stage.

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McEwan has said that he has “no patience whatsoever” with religion, something that’s not been hard to detect since 1997’s Enduring Love, where a north London science writer’s agreeable domestic life is threatened by a religious stalker. (Christopher Hitchens once suggested that McEwan’s hostility to irrationalism had “something of the zeal of the convert”, after some early flirtations with mysticism.) In The Children Act, however, his exasperation comes close to being damagingly shrill.

Before reaching the central plot, he limbers up with an Orthodox Jew who wants to deny his daughters a proper education, a Muslim who abducts his own child and a Catholic couple who would rather both their Siamese twins died than one be saved by surgery. Having put all of them right, Fiona is then faced with Adam, a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness whose parents won’t allow a blood transfusion to treat his leukaemia.

Of course, it’s impossible to disagree with McEwan’s contention that in a civilised society, the well-being of children must outweigh their parents’ religious convictions. None the less, if a novel is structured like a debate, the writer should surely at least try to give the other side some good lines – as McEwan did for the pro-Iraq War case in Saturday or climate-change scepticism in Solar. In The Children Act, there’s no sense that religion is anything but an Aunt Sally.

When Fiona braves the “shabby tangle of London south of the river” to visit Adam in hospital, she finds a boy of impressive precociousness who, among much else, “could recite a long part of an ode by Horace”. Yet, while he initially sides with his parents, he’s no match for a brief touch of Fiona’s secularism. Once she’s ruled in favour of transfusion, he reacts with huge gratitude – and undisguised gobbets of the author’s message: “My parents’ religion was like a poison and you were the antidote… It was like a grown-up had come into a room full of kids.”

The book doesn’t stop there – but, although I won’t reveal what happens next, it does rather confirm the theory that, except for Atonement, the second halves of McEwan’s novels are less successful than the first. Even his friend Galen Strawson, who reads McEwan’s work before publication, has said that “Ian is essentially a short-story writer”, and that his books are often stories “pushed into a novel”. By my reckoning, there are at least three highly implausible twists as he strives, with diminishing returns, to push The Children Act into a novel. None is justified either by his obvious desire to remind us of religion’s annoying persistence, or by Fiona’s childlessness, often a sign of human incompleteness in his work.

The book still contains plenty of good, typically precise writing, from the courtroom couples “dazed to find themselves in vicious combat with the one they once loved” to Fiona and Jack stepping “daintily around each other, like dancers at a hoedown” after their uneasy reconciliation. Yet, in the end – especially given the choice of Jehovah’s Witnesses as the chief target – the feeling persists that McEwan’s considerable intellectual and literary firepower is here being used for little more than shooting fish in a barrel.